December 23, 2024 • 39 mins
Nutmeg is native to the Banda Islands in Indonesia. Once Europeans discovered nutmeg, they had an enormous - often violent - impact on the islands it was growing on.
Research:
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "nutmeg". Encyclopedia Britannica, 25 Oct. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/nutmeg. Accessed 22 November 2024.
- Esarey, Logan. “The Literary Spirit Among the Early Ohio Valley Settlers.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 5, no. 2, 1918, pp. 143–57. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1886120. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.
- Ghosh, Amitav. “The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.” University of Chicago Press. 2021.
- Godinez, Andrea. “3,500-year-old pumpkin spice? Archaeologists find the earliest use of nutmeg as a food.” University of Washington. Via EurekAlert. 10/3/2018. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/578241
- Haliburton, Thomas Chandler. “The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick, of Slickville, to which is added, The Bubbles of Canada by the Same Author.” Paris, 1839. https://books.google.com/books?id=jtssAAAAYAAJ
- Hill, Daniel Harvey. “Elements of Algebra.” J.B. Lippincott & Co. Philadelphia. 1857. https://books.google.com/books?id=5JoKAAAAYAAJ
- Intermediate Technology Development Group. “Processing of Nutmeg and Mace.” https://archive.org/details/production_nutmeg_mace/
- Keyser, Hannah. “Why is Connecticut Called the “Nutmeg State”?.” Mental Floss. 9/26/2023. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55245/why-connecticut-called-nutmeg-state
- Lohman, Sarah. “Why Early America Was Obsessed With Wooden Nutmegs.” Mental Floss. 4/24/2017. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94734/why-early-america-was-obsessed-wooden-nutmegs
- Rampe, Amelia. “Everything You Need to Know About Nutmeg.” Food and Wine. 12/28/2022. https://www.foodandwine.com/nutmeg-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it-7089902
- Sasikumar*, B. “Nutmeg - Origin, diversity, distribution and history.” Journal of Spices and Aromatic Crops. Vol. 30, No. 2. 2021.
- Spence, Charles. “Nutmeg and mace: The sweet and savoury spices.” International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science. Vol. 36, 2004.
- The North American Review, vol. 15, no. 37, 1822, pp. 340–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25109151. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.
- Weil, Andrew T. “The use of nutmeg as a psychotropic agent.” United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/bulletin/bulletin_1966-01-01_4_page003.html
- Winn, Philip. “Slavery and cultural creativity in the Banda Islands.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , October 2010, Vol. 41, No. 3. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20778894
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I really can't speak for
anywhere else but here in the United States, it can
(00:21):
feel like there's just a whole lot of nutmeg around
from roughly October into maybe early January. Nutmeg is in
the spice blend known as pumpkin spice, along with usually
cinnamon and cloves, that does not taste anything like pumpkin,
and it's not supposed to mimic pumpkin flavor. Those are
(00:43):
the spices that are usually used to flavor pumpkin pies.
It would be incredibly hard to miss the fact that nowadays,
in the fall here there is just pumpkin spice blend
and seemingly everything everywhere. Then as we get more towards winter,
nutmeg goes into mulled ciders and mulled wines and eggnog,
(01:05):
which is a personal favorite of mine. In my family,
sugar cookies are a Christmas tradition, and the family sugar
cookie recipe is flavored with vanilla and nutmeg. Obviously, that's
not everything. Nutmeg goes into not even just in the
United States, but it's December, so that's where my mind
is right now. Behind the scenes, we're gonna talk about
(01:29):
nutmeg is year round. Of course, nutmeg is not native
to the United States. It is native to the Banda
Islands in Indonesia. The Banda Islands are part of the
Malucas Archipelago that's also home to other spices, including cloves,
so this region has also been called the Spice Islands.
(01:49):
People living on these islands traded spice with Asia and
with other parts of the Pacific for centuries before Europeans
even knew where they were or frankly, what nutmeg was.
But once Europeans found that out, they had an enormous
impact on nutmeg and on the islands that they were
growing on and the people living there. That means some
(02:12):
of the history we are going to be talking about
today involves a lot of violence and genocide. The word
nutmeg is used to describe a number of fruits and
seeds from all around the world. What we're talking about
today comes from the meristica fragrance tree. It's an evergreen
tree with broad, glossy leaves which can grow to between
(02:32):
nine and twelve meters or thirty and forty feet in height.
This tree requires shade, especially when it's young, so it
usually grows alongside larger trees. Nutmeg trees normally bear fruit
for the first time when they're around seven years old,
and it's only around that time that you can tell
whether it's a male or female tree, and the female
(02:56):
trees are the ones that produce fruit At the peak
of productive vity. One of these trees can produce as
many as twenty thousand fruit in a season, and they
can produce fruit for sixty years or more. They can
even live for more than a century. The fruit of
this tree is a drupe, meaning a fleshy fruit that
(03:16):
usually has one single seed in the middle, like a
peach or an olive. The outer flesh of this droup
is pale yellow, and it is edible. People eat it
in the areas where it grows, including by making it
into jams. When the fruit fully matures, the outer fleshy
part splits open, and that reveals a shiny brown seed
(03:36):
in the middle. This seed is surrounded by an arrowl
which is a softer and in this case, bright red layer.
The arrow of this particular seed is not a solid covering.
It looks almost like somebody haphazardly painted the seed from
one end to the other in a thick red nail polish,
leaving some overlaps and some gaps. This is the source
(03:59):
of two spices, nutmeg from the seed and mace from
the aarrowl They have a similar flavor, which is warm
and earthy and a little bit nutty, but mace tends
to be both lighter and pepperier. Turning these into spices
involves removing the arrow from the seed and then drying
the two parts separately in the sun. This process takes
(04:22):
just a few hours for mace, but drying and curing
the nutmeg takes six to eight weeks. The nutmeg spice
doesn't come from the whole seed, but from smaller kernels
that are inside of it. Once the seed is fully dry,
you can shake it and those rattle around in there. Typically,
these kernels are removed by tapping one end of the
(04:45):
seed covering to break it open. Sometimes that's done by
hand and sometimes with a machine. You can purchase both
nutmeg and mace, either ground or whole. Whole. Nutmeg looks
like a little dried nut while mace blades, which is
what the whole form is called that looks more like
little dried fruit strips. According to a twenty eighteen paper
(05:07):
published in the journal Asian Perspectives that examined residues on
pottery fragments, the earliest known use of nutmeg and food
dates back thirty five hundred years. Nutmeg was also one
of the first spices to be traded from these islands.
The Bandonese traded nutmeg to other parts of Southeast Asia
as long ago as two thousand BCE, and later to
(05:29):
South and Southwest Asia. Over the centuries that followed, traders
carried the spice to other parts of the world, including
Eastern Africa. It had probably made its way to the
Roman Empire by about two thousand years ago. Pliny the
Elder described a tree whose fruit has two flavors that
sounds like it could be nutmeg. By the sixth century,
(05:53):
nutmeg had been introduced into what's now Istanbul, and by
the Middle Ages it had made its way to Western Europe.
Centuries virtually all of the nutmeg that arrived in Western
Europe got there via Arab traders through the port of Venice,
and for a long time Europeans didn't know exactly where
this spice was coming from. Its origin was a closely
(06:14):
guarded secret. It's possible that nutmeg was carried from Indonesia
to Polynesia to the Americas before Columbus made his first
voyage in the fifteenth century, but the largest source of
nutmeg was more likely to have been European colonists later on.
Throughout its history, nutmeg has been used to make incense
(06:35):
and fragrances. The earliest references to medicinal uses for nutmeg
are in the Hindu texts known as the Vedas, which
date back to about fifteen hundred BCE on the Indian subcontinent.
Chinese medical texts from the eighth century described using nutmeg
to treat diarrhea. Persian mathematician and physician Ibincina, also known
(06:57):
as Avicenna, described as semi used for nutmeg and his
Canon of Medicine in ten twenty five. In various parts
of the world, nutmeg has also been used to treat
and prevent flatulence, and in more recent years there have
been controlled trials into whether it's effective against a range
of conditions, including diabetic, neuropathy, depression, and digestive issues. Including
(07:22):
nausea and vomiting. Essential oils can be extracted from nutmeg
and maze through pressing or steam distillation, which produces nutmeg
butter or oil of mace. In addition to being used
in condiments and fragrances, these are also used medicinally. Nutmeg
butter in particular has also been used to make pain
(07:43):
relieving topical creams to treat conditions like arthritis, and there
are some other uses for nutmeg as well. One of
nutmeg's many compounds is called maristicin, and it has a
number of properties, including being insecticidal. Why twelfth century Holy
Roman Emperor Henry the sixth had the streets of Rome
(08:05):
fumigated with it before his coronation. The Tale of Sir
Topas from Jeffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which was written at
the end of the fourteenth century, also includes a description
of riding through a fair forest full of wild beasts
and herbs large and small, with one of those herbs
being quote note mudge to put an ale, whether it
(08:29):
be moist or stale, or for to lay in a coffer.
A coffer is a cabinet or a trunk where a
person would store their clothes, so it's possible that laying
nutmeg in the coffer was about keeping the moths or
the fleas or other pests away. And of course, nutmeg
has been used to flavor a wide range of sweet
(08:49):
and savory foods all over the world. It's one of
the flavorings in bechamel sauce, which is one of the
mother sauces in French cuisine. It's also part of a
lot of spice blends, including mulling spices in various parts
of Europe, jerk seasonings in Jamaica, catre pice in France,
Speculus Croyden in the Netherlands, mixed spice in the uk
(09:13):
rasal hanout in Northern Africa, and of course pumpkin spice
here in the US. Pumpkin spice might seem like a
recent invention, based on its increasing ubiquity in the autumn
over the last couple of decades, but McCormick's first pumpkin
spice blend, containing cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice, launched ninety
years ago in nineteen thirty four. Also, we know people
(09:36):
have extremely strong feelings about their spice blends, so if
in your opinion, nutmeg does not belong in one of
those that we just mentioned, absolutely don't use it in there,
or don't purchase the pre made ones that include it.
Historical medical literature also includes numerous accounts of nutmeg poisoning.
Nutmeg butter contains high concentrations of various subs distances that
(10:00):
can be toxic, but the spice can also be toxic
if it's ingested in large amounts. Overwhelmingly, these reports have
not been from somebody just overdoing it with the nutmeg
in their cooking, though some of the compounds in nutmeg
can be intoxicants or hallucinogens, and so there are cases
(10:21):
of people poisoning themselves while intentionally ingesting it for that reason,
But most of the reports in historical medical literature have
described someone who is attempting to terminate a pregnancy, and
nearly all of those reports those attempts were not successful,
but the person did become very ill. In more recent years,
(10:43):
there have also been viral nutmeg challenges on social media,
leading to calls to poison control or even hospitalizations. Please
do not eat giant tablespoonsful of nutmeg. The risks of
ingesting large amounts of nutsg have been known for a
very long time. There was a saying at the Sealerno
(11:04):
School of Medicine, which was founded in Salerno, Italy in
the tenth century that quote, one nut is good for you,
the second will do you harm, the third will kill you.
To be clear, though there is only one known fatality
from ingesting nutmeg, which was in an eight year old
who ate two whole nutmegs. There is no antidote for
(11:25):
nutmeg poisoning though, people are just given supportive care as
they recover, so once again, don't be chugging down tons
of nutmeg now. Today the vast majority of nutmeg being
produced is used as a flavoring and processed foods like sausages. Globally,
about twelve thousand tons of nutmeg are produced annually and
(11:48):
about two thousand tons of mace. That sounds like a lot,
especially when you considering how much does come and like
a little nutmeg jar for your house, But that's only
about ten percent of how much pepper is produced every year,
and pepper production is less than twenty percent of chili production.
After a quick sponsor break, we're gonna talk more about
(12:10):
the Banda Islands and what happened there after, Europeans learned
that they were the home of nutmeg. By the Middle Ages,
nutmeg had become a big part of Western European cuisine.
(12:31):
As we said earlier, most of it was being brought
to Venice by Arab traders and then going on to
the rest of Europe from there. In the late Middle
Ages to the early Modern era, nutmeg was so popular
in Europe that people carried their own pocket graters and
receptacles for the ground nutmeg so that they could grate
fresh nutmeg onto their food there at the table. For
(12:54):
wealthy people, these were usually made of silver, and silversmiths
used nutmeg vessels to really demonstrate their skills. Sometimes the
container and the greater were all one device that was
cleverly shaped like some kind of seed or something else entirely.
Less wealthy people typically still had these if they had
(13:15):
enough money to afford nutmeg, but it would be something
more like a ten grater and a wooden box. The
seventeenth century cookbook The Accomplished Cook by Robert May demonstrates
how popular nutmeg was in England in the early modern
period and how extensively it was being used in food.
This cookbook is about five hundred twenty pages long, and
(13:37):
it contained six hundred eight mentions of nutmeg and five
hundred sixty nine mentions of mace. And it's not just
in one kind of food. The recipes are arranged in
twenty four sections like boiled meats, roast meats, puddings, creams,
pies and tarts, fish and salads. That's salads just spelled differently.
(13:58):
The only sections that do don't seem to contain any nutmeg,
or the section on salads and the last section, which
is about what to feed poultry. It's possible that there's
a nutmeg mentioned in the salads that I missed that's
maybe spelled weirdly because there are a couple of spelling
variations in these in this book. But like basically every
kind of food had nutmeg in it. It's not entirely
(14:21):
clear when and how Europeans learned exactly where nutmeg came from.
A couple of the sources that were used in this
episode specifically mentioned geographer Zakaria al Kaswini, who was born
in what's now Iran, and they claim that he disclosed
what had been a secret. I'm honestly not sure what
(14:43):
he might have said about nutmeg and his writing because
I did not have access to those texts, but he
did describe cinnamon as coming from a place called serendib
which was Sri Lanka. He did that about twelve seventy five.
Ibn Batuta, who we've covered on the show before, all
also described Sri Lanka as the home to cinnamon in
thirteen forty. So cinnamon is not nutmeg. Sri Lanka is
(15:06):
off the eastern coast of India. It is far to
the west of the Banda Islands. But it's very clear
that sources like these translated into Latin, were one of
the ways Europeans learned about where various spices came from.
It's really likely that sources like these and other translations
of Arabic works, with ongoing patterns of trade, and the
(15:29):
accounts of European explorers and cartographers and other travelers, that
all this combined to give Europeans a general idea of
where the spice islands were by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
With that knowledge, various European powers started trying to capture
parts of South and Southeast Asia, not just for nutmeg,
(15:51):
but for the other spices and trade goods that were
coming out of the region as well. In fifteen eleven,
a force led by Alfonso de Albuquerque of Portugal captured
Malacca in what's now Malaysia, which was a key trading
hub for the Indonesian archipelago. This made it possible for
the Portuguese to start buying nutmeg directly from the Banda
(16:12):
Islands rather than going through Arab traders. At that point,
the Portuguese didn't really have the military or naval strength
to start trying to conquer the islands themselves, but the
Dutch and the English did. The Dutch invaded the Banda
Islands in fifteen ninety nine and established the Dutch East
(16:33):
India Company or VOC. Two years later, in sixteen sixteen,
the English took control of the island of Run, which
is part of this archipelago. They were basically just trying
to keep it out of the hands of the Dutch,
and then the English established the English East India Company.
The English and the Dutch fought over territory in these islands,
(16:56):
including the Dutch laying siege to Run and ultimately occupying
it in sixteen twenty one. The VOC aggressively worked to
limit nutmeg production only to the islands that it controlled,
and to establish a monopoly on the nutmeg trade. This
meant destroying nutmeg trees on islands it did not control
(17:17):
and trying to force the Bandonese to stop trading their
own nutmeg with any of their existing trading partners. There
was no central Bandonese authority for the Dutch or any
other European power to try to treat with. There were
various elders and families that had become wealthy as traders
on each of these islands, but even from one island
(17:40):
to another, there was no one primary authority figure. Broadly speaking, though,
the Bandonese refused to accept Dutch claims over the islands,
and the idea of a trading monopoly was just completely
foreign to them. They aggressively fought back, and the Dutch
decided the best course of action would be to clear
(18:01):
the islands of as many of them as possible. At first,
the Dutch tried to get the Bandonese to leave, including
trying to convince them to surrender their weapons, destroy their
own villages, and allow the Dutch to deport them to
somewhere else. When that didn't work, Governor General Jan Peterson
Kuhn met with his council to formulate a new plan,
(18:24):
and they unanimously agreed to burn down the Bandonese villages
and destroy all of their boats themselves, so that the
Bandonese would have no choice but to go where the
Dutch took them. During this sweep of destruction, the Dutch
captured and enslaved some of the Bandonese, but they massacred
many more. It's estimated that there were thirteen thousand to
(18:46):
fifteen thousand people living in the Banda Islands before the
Dutch conquest and genocide, and then only about one thousand afterward.
This took place over just a couple of months in
sixteen twenty one, but surviving Bandonese who had fled to
the mountains or to other nearby archipelagos continued to fight
(19:07):
against the Dutch for years. The people of the Banda
Islands had been nurturing and harvesting from nutmeg trees for
thousands of years. The trees were one part of the
land that they lived with, interconnected with everything else on
the islands that they shared. But the Dutch East India
Company moved to a system of large cultivated nutmeg estates,
(19:31):
including attempting to uproot young nutmeg trees out of their
forests to transplant them to these plantations. But the Bandonese
were the only people who actually knew how to grow
and process nutmeg, so the Dutch intentionally divided up the
remaining Bandonese population, including separating families, to make sure there
(19:52):
was at least one person with the necessary knowledge at
each of the plantations. The resulting practices for cultivating these
trees became a hybrid of indigenous knowledge and imported European methods.
The Dutch also enslaved people from other islands to work
on the plantations. About thirteen percent of the enslaved population
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in the Banda Islands was Bandanese, and then the rest
were from somewhere else, usually in Southeast Asia, places that
the voc had claimed other territory. This had a similar
impact to the Transatlantic slave trade in Africa, including influencing
the escalation of warfare among different peoples, as the Dutch
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then enslaved their prisoners of war. In addition to the
enslaved people who were working on nutmeg plantations, Dutch officials
also enslaved people in their households. They were also known
for forcing the people who they saw as the best
workers to serve on their trading ships. The Dutch East
India Company's efforts to keep the Banda Islands and its
(20:58):
nutmeg monopoly wasn't just a military effort. They also distributed
inaccurate maps to try to keep other European powers from
knowing exactly where the islands were, and once they had
a monopoly, they artificially controlled the price of nutmeg, including
by burning down warehouses full of it when there was
(21:20):
an oversupply. The Dutch monopoly on nutmeg lasted for more
than a century. In sixteen sixty seven, the Dutch Republic
solidified its hold on these islands through the Treaty of Bretta,
which ended the Second Anglo Dutch War. This treaty formalized
Dutch control of the island of Run in exchange for
(21:42):
English control of the island of Manhattan, which is why
sometimes people say the Dutch traded Manhattan for nutmeg. But
in seventeen sixty nine, French horticulturalist Pierre Poivre, who is
possibly the namesake of the nursery rhyme character Peter Piper,
smuggled thirty two nutmeg seed links from the Banda Islands
(22:02):
to the French colony of Mauritius. This was actually his
second attempt. On his first try, only two of the
seedlings survived. By seventeen seventy three, nutmeg trees were also
being introduced to other French colonies that seemed like they
might have the right climate for them. Later, during the
(22:22):
French Revolutionary Wars, the Dutch Republic became the Batavian Republic,
and then that came under control of the French Empire.
So during the Napoleonic Wars, the British invaded the Banda Islands,
now considered part of the general French territory. That was
a campaign that took about seven months, and then after
(22:43):
taking control of the islands, the British started introducing nutmeg
trees to their colonies in the Caribbean as well. English
planter Frank Gurney introduced nutmeg trees to Grenada in eighteen
forty three, with the first commercial non utmeg plantation established
there in eighteen fifty. These new sources of nutmeg meant
(23:05):
that the price of nutmeg plummeted in North America in
the mid to late nineteenth century, Eventually, control of the
Banda Islands did return to the Dutch, but by that
point nutmeg trees had been transplanted to so many other
places controlled by other countries that there was no way
for the Dutch to re establish a monopoly. Slavery was
(23:29):
abolished in the Netherlands Indies in eighteen sixty three. Japan
invaded Indonesia during World War II, and Indonesia proclaimed its
independence shortly after the Japanese surrender. Today, Indonesia is the
source of about seventy five percent of global nutmeg production.
Grenada was producing about twenty percent of the world's nutmeg
(23:50):
until Hurricane Ivan devastated the islands nutmeg trees in two
thousand and four. Since it takes roughly seven years for
nutmeg trees to produce their first fruit after being planted,
and it takes about twenty years for them to reach
full productivity, the nutmeg industry on Grenada took a very
long time to recover. Other sources of nutmeg include Sri Lanka, India, China,
(24:14):
and a number of islands off the coast of Africa
and in the Caribbean. After another sponsor break, we will
take a look at one of the weirder parts of
nutmeg's history. As Europeans started colonizing the Americas, as we
(24:38):
said earlier, they brought nutmeg with them. Nutmeg became less
expensive and more widely available in the United States after
the Dutch started to lose their monopoly. Between eighteen fifty
four and eighteen sixty eight, seventeen different mechanical nutmeg graters
were patented in the United States, so that's an indication
(24:58):
of how popular and available nutmeg was by then. Prior
to that, though, nutmeg could be really expensive, so sometimes
people made fake nutmegs out of wood to sell them
to unsuspecting people in place of the real thing. Maybe
there's some debate about this. A dried whole nutmeg does
(25:22):
look sort of like it's made of wood. It's feasible
that someone could carve one and try to pass it
off as the real thing. But nutmeg has a very
distinct fragrance. It might not be as perceptible as a
whole dried seed, especially somewhere like a store where it
might be surrounded by other fragrance spices, but as soon
(25:43):
as someone tried to grade it onto their food, it
would be completely obvious that they were getting sawdust and
not nutmeg. It would not take long for word to
spread that so and so down at the mercantile was
selling wooden fake nutmegs. It might be more feasible for
a traveling peddler who could leave town before people realized
(26:04):
their nutmegs were fake. But if people knew there was
a risk of buying wooden nutmegs, they could just take
a great big sniff before buying, and if it didn't
seem obvious at that point, insist on grading a tiny
bit off to smell it before making a purchase. Another
possibility is that importers and wholesalers were using wooden nutmegs
(26:26):
to stretch out their stock, so mixing some wooden nutmegs
into a barrel of real ones before shipping it out again.
This is possibly a little bit more believable, although there
are questions of how much it would have cost to
pay someone to hand carved wooden nutmegs with a nineteenth
century tool, and how that would compare to the cost
(26:47):
of actually having real nutmegs. I've read a whole paper
on this trying to work out whether it was economically
feasible to con people in this way. Regard wordless of
whether people really were passing off wooden nutmegs as the
real thing, there was definitely a perception that this was happening.
(27:09):
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wooden nutmeg as quote a
false or fraudulent thing, a fraud, cheat, or deception, also
in more direct illusions, as representing the type of something
useless or worthless. A lot of the uses of the
term wooden nutmeg that the OED sites are about merchants
(27:32):
and pedlars, specifically Northern merchants and pedlars in the United States.
In addition to the anti Northern bias shown there, some
of these entries are also anti Semitic. They compare these
Northern pedlars to Jewish pedlars and then either imply or
just flat out state that Jewish people are also dishonest.
(27:57):
A number of these uses of the term woulden nutmeg
also particularly focused on peddlers from Connecticut. A lot of
the nutmeg supply in North America came through Connecticut Port,
which is connected to why one of the unofficial mottos
for Connecticut is the Nutmeg State, and Connecticut residents are
(28:17):
sometimes called nutmegers. I was in Connecticut this weekend, and
I mentioned that this was the topic of the episode
that I was working on, and the Connecticut residence there
immediately said, are you going to talk about Connecticut being
the nutmeg State? The oeds first use reported for wooden
(28:38):
nutmegs is cited as being published in eighteen twenty two.
This was in a pedestrian tour of two thousand, three
hundred miles in North America to the Lakes, the Canadas,
and the New England States, performed in the autumn of
eighteen twenty one, embellished with views by P. Stansbury, New
(28:58):
York eighteen twenty that was published in North American Review.
One section described a group of people encountered by this
mister Stansbury quote. Among them were two persons whom he
pronounces to have been in the mild signification of the
term Boston sharpers, and who commenced business by a boisterous
(29:21):
colloquy about such smart men of their town, such and
such sharp fellows in their neighborhood, and made many shrewd
remarks concerning horse dealing, swapping, purchasing molasses, and vending clocks,
wooden bowls, and pumpkin pie dishes to the south ward.
We think we see the wicked smile of these rogues,
(29:43):
and making our poor pedestrian swallow all they chose to
put themselves off for, and a high treat they must
have had to see worthy mister Stansbury entering them in
his notebook, first as horse jockeys, then West India super cargoes,
then traveling peddlers, or rather all at once without the
(30:05):
good man's dreaming of the hoax. The Boston folks are sharp,
indeed rather too much so to blow themselves. Thus to
mister Stansbury, we have no doubt he expected every moment
to see the dogs pull out a bag of wooden nutmegs.
Another early example is from eighteen thirty six in the
(30:27):
Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville by Thomas
Halliburton that was published in the Nova Scotian. This passage
describes a captain Allspice of Nahaunt, which is a town
on a little peninsula in Massachusetts, roughly between Boston and Salem.
Quote he used to trade to Charleston, and he carried
(30:47):
a cargo once there of barrels of nutmegs. Well, he
put half a bushel of good ones into each end
of the barrel, and the rest he filled up with
wooden ones, so like the real thing. No soul could
tell the difference until he bit one with his teeth,
and that he never thought of doing until he was
first bit himself. Well, it's been a standing joke with
(31:09):
them Southerners again us ever since. This work uses the
term wooden nutmeg at two other points to describe someone
as a cheat. The idea that Northerners, especially northern merchants
and peddlers, were con artists, even made its way into
things like math problems. Elements of Algebra by Daniel Harvey Hill,
(31:32):
published in eighteen fifty seven, included this word problem quote.
A Yankee mixes a certain number of wooden nutmegs, which
cost him one quarter cent apiece, with a quality of
real nutmegs worth four cents apiece, and sells the whole
assortment for forty four dollars and gains three dollars seventy
(31:52):
five cents by the fraud. How many wooden nutmegs were there?
The answer, according to the text book, is one hundred.
I did some maths that came up with the answer
one hundred, but I don't know if that's the way
it was meant to be solved. Hill was a professor
of mathematics and civil engineering at Davidson College in North
(32:15):
Carolina and would go on to be a Confederate general.
One of the sources used in this episode framed all
of this as an example of Southern attitudes toward the
North in the years just before the US Civil War.
But this book was also published in Philadelphia, so if
that's the case, his northern publisher left it in there.
(32:38):
The use of the term wooden nutmegs went on long
past the end of the Dutch monopoly on the space.
A nineteen eighteen article by Logan Israe was published in
the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, and it was titled the
Literary Spirit among the Early Ohio Valley Settlers. This essay
is about the availability of books and literature in the
(32:59):
East Ohio Valley and the state of the publishing and
literary industries there. It reads, in part quote, how far
the commercial desire inspired the Western writers, One cannot tell,
but it had some influence. Nor was there an entire
lack of a book market in the valley. One writer
states that all the tin wagon, pitt coal, indigo, wooden nutmeg,
(33:22):
and wooden clock peddlers of Connecticut, then operating in the west,
had suddenly turned into book agents. Their books were said
to be out of date editions and unsalable books of
New England refurnished with new dates and gaudy illustrations. We
only need refer to tradition to prove how successful were
these locusts in gulling the people. It may easily be
(33:45):
surmised that many a Westerner imagined he could equal the
literary work in these books. The use of the word
wooden nutmegs to mean a dishonest cheat seems to have
been most prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nowadays,
most of the uses of it that you'll see in
newly published things like news articles, magazine articles, things like
(34:07):
that they are in discussions of wooden nutmegs and where
that saying came from, not in most cases somebody actually
using it to describe someone else as untrustworthy. Uh, if
you are about to go enjoy some eggnog or sugar
cookies or pumpkin pie or mold cider or speculas or
(34:28):
sausage or jerk chicken, or any of the many other
dishes in the world that often include nutmeg. Please enjoy,
but not a whole giant spoonful. We beg, please do not.
Uh yeah, so that's nutmeg. I have a little listener
man also to take us out, bring us on a
(34:48):
delicious episode. This is from Ali, and Ali wrote to
us and said, Hi, I love you guys. I've been
listening to the podcast since I learned what podcasts were
Hahi at least a decade or so. My favorite show
by far. I heard you all mentioned open access journals
in an April episode, and I thought i'd give you
an insider look at this change in publication type. In
(35:09):
the past, the payment for publishing journals came from the
organizations that had a subscription and anyone who chose to
pay individually to read them. The authors, researchers and scientists,
generally at universities, did not pay to publish them and
also receive no payment. Open access allows readers to view
them for free. Amazing and how all of scientific information
(35:31):
should work. But to the researchers and professors now have
to be the ones who pay to publish the article.
About three thousand dollars US per article. Huge universities such
as Duke might have a fund for this, but most
universities and their professors have no money to do so.
Therefore this work now goes unpublished in those journals. More
(35:52):
and more publishing companies are going open access because the
payment they receive with certainty about three thousand dollars from
the professors might be more than they would get from subscriptions.
Scientists and researchers with smaller budgets, such as history professors,
are finding it more and more difficult to publish their
studies and work. The big budget are when organizations are
(36:14):
the ones who can afford it. Now, so we both
love and hate access. Scientific information should be open to all,
inaccessible for researchers to publish. Heart emoji, love you all, Ali,
Thank you Ali for this. It's not really new information
to me, but I thought it might be to our listeners.
My opinion is that the entire ecosystem of academic journal
(36:39):
publishing is very broken in a variety of ways because
there's this whole issue. There are some resources available in
some cases for people to get funding to pay that
open access fee. I have somewhere on my computer or
(37:00):
a bookmarked list of like one particular organization that has
provided a lot of grant funding to researchers, and one
of the conditions is open access publishing that is then funded,
so like there are some options for that, but of
course those are in a limited supply and might not
exist in all the different fields and specializations. There's just
(37:25):
I feel like every time I turn around a new
headline about some kind of crisis in academic publishing, including
widespread stuff making it through peer review that should not
have and things being retracted that have gone on to
just be the basis of multiple other papers later on.
And for me as a person who is working on
(37:48):
a generalist podcast that does not have a budget to
pay individually for articles, sometimes when I'm working on something
like Unearthed, there might be hundreds of articles that I
am looking at and there's no way to pay the
somewhere between thirty and like seventy five dollars a piece
(38:11):
to read every one of them. I do have multiple
library cards to multiple library systems, including some academic libraries,
but even with that, sometimes, like if there's a paper
behind a seventy five dollars paywall or whatever that I
just don't have access to through any of those other
(38:34):
resources that's probably not getting used on the show. Occasionally
it's the seventy five dollars paywall for an article that
was published a century ago, and that gets very wild
to me because that eventually we get to the point
where you would think that would be in the public domain,
but it's still behind a paywall. So a lot of
(38:56):
different ways to criticize and find frustrating with this entire industry,
and yet it's one that we rely on for our work,
and that you know, people I know who are in
academia also rely on for their work in a completely
different way. So thank you again, Ali for that email,
(39:17):
and to everyone for listening to my rant about academic publishing.
If you'd like to send us a note about this
or any other podcast story, history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
(39:40):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I really can't speak for
anywhere else but here in the United States, it can
(00:21):
feel like there's just a whole lot of nutmeg around
from roughly October into maybe early January. Nutmeg is in
the spice blend known as pumpkin spice, along with usually
cinnamon and cloves, that does not taste anything like pumpkin,
and it's not supposed to mimic pumpkin flavor. Those are
(00:43):
the spices that are usually used to flavor pumpkin pies.
It would be incredibly hard to miss the fact that nowadays,
in the fall here there is just pumpkin spice blend
and seemingly everything everywhere. Then as we get more towards winter,
nutmeg goes into mulled ciders and mulled wines and eggnog,
(01:05):
which is a personal favorite of mine. In my family,
sugar cookies are a Christmas tradition, and the family sugar
cookie recipe is flavored with vanilla and nutmeg. Obviously, that's
not everything. Nutmeg goes into not even just in the
United States, but it's December, so that's where my mind
is right now. Behind the scenes, we're gonna talk about
(01:29):
nutmeg is year round. Of course, nutmeg is not native
to the United States. It is native to the Banda
Islands in Indonesia. The Banda Islands are part of the
Malucas Archipelago that's also home to other spices, including cloves,
so this region has also been called the Spice Islands.
(01:49):
People living on these islands traded spice with Asia and
with other parts of the Pacific for centuries before Europeans
even knew where they were or frankly, what nutmeg was.
But once Europeans found that out, they had an enormous
impact on nutmeg and on the islands that they were
growing on and the people living there. That means some
(02:12):
of the history we are going to be talking about
today involves a lot of violence and genocide. The word
nutmeg is used to describe a number of fruits and
seeds from all around the world. What we're talking about
today comes from the meristica fragrance tree. It's an evergreen
tree with broad, glossy leaves which can grow to between
(02:32):
nine and twelve meters or thirty and forty feet in height.
This tree requires shade, especially when it's young, so it
usually grows alongside larger trees. Nutmeg trees normally bear fruit
for the first time when they're around seven years old,
and it's only around that time that you can tell
whether it's a male or female tree, and the female
(02:56):
trees are the ones that produce fruit At the peak
of productive vity. One of these trees can produce as
many as twenty thousand fruit in a season, and they
can produce fruit for sixty years or more. They can
even live for more than a century. The fruit of
this tree is a drupe, meaning a fleshy fruit that
(03:16):
usually has one single seed in the middle, like a
peach or an olive. The outer flesh of this droup
is pale yellow, and it is edible. People eat it
in the areas where it grows, including by making it
into jams. When the fruit fully matures, the outer fleshy
part splits open, and that reveals a shiny brown seed
(03:36):
in the middle. This seed is surrounded by an arrowl
which is a softer and in this case, bright red layer.
The arrow of this particular seed is not a solid covering.
It looks almost like somebody haphazardly painted the seed from
one end to the other in a thick red nail polish,
leaving some overlaps and some gaps. This is the source
(03:59):
of two spices, nutmeg from the seed and mace from
the aarrowl They have a similar flavor, which is warm
and earthy and a little bit nutty, but mace tends
to be both lighter and pepperier. Turning these into spices
involves removing the arrow from the seed and then drying
the two parts separately in the sun. This process takes
(04:22):
just a few hours for mace, but drying and curing
the nutmeg takes six to eight weeks. The nutmeg spice
doesn't come from the whole seed, but from smaller kernels
that are inside of it. Once the seed is fully dry,
you can shake it and those rattle around in there. Typically,
these kernels are removed by tapping one end of the
(04:45):
seed covering to break it open. Sometimes that's done by
hand and sometimes with a machine. You can purchase both
nutmeg and mace, either ground or whole. Whole. Nutmeg looks
like a little dried nut while mace blades, which is
what the whole form is called that looks more like
little dried fruit strips. According to a twenty eighteen paper
(05:07):
published in the journal Asian Perspectives that examined residues on
pottery fragments, the earliest known use of nutmeg and food
dates back thirty five hundred years. Nutmeg was also one
of the first spices to be traded from these islands.
The Bandonese traded nutmeg to other parts of Southeast Asia
as long ago as two thousand BCE, and later to
(05:29):
South and Southwest Asia. Over the centuries that followed, traders
carried the spice to other parts of the world, including
Eastern Africa. It had probably made its way to the
Roman Empire by about two thousand years ago. Pliny the
Elder described a tree whose fruit has two flavors that
sounds like it could be nutmeg. By the sixth century,
(05:53):
nutmeg had been introduced into what's now Istanbul, and by
the Middle Ages it had made its way to Western Europe.
Centuries virtually all of the nutmeg that arrived in Western
Europe got there via Arab traders through the port of Venice,
and for a long time Europeans didn't know exactly where
this spice was coming from. Its origin was a closely
(06:14):
guarded secret. It's possible that nutmeg was carried from Indonesia
to Polynesia to the Americas before Columbus made his first
voyage in the fifteenth century, but the largest source of
nutmeg was more likely to have been European colonists later on.
Throughout its history, nutmeg has been used to make incense
(06:35):
and fragrances. The earliest references to medicinal uses for nutmeg
are in the Hindu texts known as the Vedas, which
date back to about fifteen hundred BCE on the Indian subcontinent.
Chinese medical texts from the eighth century described using nutmeg
to treat diarrhea. Persian mathematician and physician Ibincina, also known
(06:57):
as Avicenna, described as semi used for nutmeg and his
Canon of Medicine in ten twenty five. In various parts
of the world, nutmeg has also been used to treat
and prevent flatulence, and in more recent years there have
been controlled trials into whether it's effective against a range
of conditions, including diabetic, neuropathy, depression, and digestive issues. Including
(07:22):
nausea and vomiting. Essential oils can be extracted from nutmeg
and maze through pressing or steam distillation, which produces nutmeg
butter or oil of mace. In addition to being used
in condiments and fragrances, these are also used medicinally. Nutmeg
butter in particular has also been used to make pain
(07:43):
relieving topical creams to treat conditions like arthritis, and there
are some other uses for nutmeg as well. One of
nutmeg's many compounds is called maristicin, and it has a
number of properties, including being insecticidal. Why twelfth century Holy
Roman Emperor Henry the sixth had the streets of Rome
(08:05):
fumigated with it before his coronation. The Tale of Sir
Topas from Jeffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which was written at
the end of the fourteenth century, also includes a description
of riding through a fair forest full of wild beasts
and herbs large and small, with one of those herbs
being quote note mudge to put an ale, whether it
(08:29):
be moist or stale, or for to lay in a coffer.
A coffer is a cabinet or a trunk where a
person would store their clothes, so it's possible that laying
nutmeg in the coffer was about keeping the moths or
the fleas or other pests away. And of course, nutmeg
has been used to flavor a wide range of sweet
(08:49):
and savory foods all over the world. It's one of
the flavorings in bechamel sauce, which is one of the
mother sauces in French cuisine. It's also part of a
lot of spice blends, including mulling spices in various parts
of Europe, jerk seasonings in Jamaica, catre pice in France,
Speculus Croyden in the Netherlands, mixed spice in the uk
(09:13):
rasal hanout in Northern Africa, and of course pumpkin spice
here in the US. Pumpkin spice might seem like a
recent invention, based on its increasing ubiquity in the autumn
over the last couple of decades, but McCormick's first pumpkin
spice blend, containing cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice, launched ninety
years ago in nineteen thirty four. Also, we know people
(09:36):
have extremely strong feelings about their spice blends, so if
in your opinion, nutmeg does not belong in one of
those that we just mentioned, absolutely don't use it in there,
or don't purchase the pre made ones that include it.
Historical medical literature also includes numerous accounts of nutmeg poisoning.
Nutmeg butter contains high concentrations of various subs distances that
(10:00):
can be toxic, but the spice can also be toxic
if it's ingested in large amounts. Overwhelmingly, these reports have
not been from somebody just overdoing it with the nutmeg
in their cooking, though some of the compounds in nutmeg
can be intoxicants or hallucinogens, and so there are cases
(10:21):
of people poisoning themselves while intentionally ingesting it for that reason,
But most of the reports in historical medical literature have
described someone who is attempting to terminate a pregnancy, and
nearly all of those reports those attempts were not successful,
but the person did become very ill. In more recent years,
(10:43):
there have also been viral nutmeg challenges on social media,
leading to calls to poison control or even hospitalizations. Please
do not eat giant tablespoonsful of nutmeg. The risks of
ingesting large amounts of nutsg have been known for a
very long time. There was a saying at the Sealerno
(11:04):
School of Medicine, which was founded in Salerno, Italy in
the tenth century that quote, one nut is good for you,
the second will do you harm, the third will kill you.
To be clear, though there is only one known fatality
from ingesting nutmeg, which was in an eight year old
who ate two whole nutmegs. There is no antidote for
(11:25):
nutmeg poisoning though, people are just given supportive care as
they recover, so once again, don't be chugging down tons
of nutmeg now. Today the vast majority of nutmeg being
produced is used as a flavoring and processed foods like sausages. Globally,
about twelve thousand tons of nutmeg are produced annually and
(11:48):
about two thousand tons of mace. That sounds like a lot,
especially when you considering how much does come and like
a little nutmeg jar for your house, But that's only
about ten percent of how much pepper is produced every year,
and pepper production is less than twenty percent of chili production.
After a quick sponsor break, we're gonna talk more about
(12:10):
the Banda Islands and what happened there after, Europeans learned
that they were the home of nutmeg. By the Middle Ages,
nutmeg had become a big part of Western European cuisine.
(12:31):
As we said earlier, most of it was being brought
to Venice by Arab traders and then going on to
the rest of Europe from there. In the late Middle
Ages to the early Modern era, nutmeg was so popular
in Europe that people carried their own pocket graters and
receptacles for the ground nutmeg so that they could grate
fresh nutmeg onto their food there at the table. For
(12:54):
wealthy people, these were usually made of silver, and silversmiths
used nutmeg vessels to really demonstrate their skills. Sometimes the
container and the greater were all one device that was
cleverly shaped like some kind of seed or something else entirely.
Less wealthy people typically still had these if they had
(13:15):
enough money to afford nutmeg, but it would be something
more like a ten grater and a wooden box. The
seventeenth century cookbook The Accomplished Cook by Robert May demonstrates
how popular nutmeg was in England in the early modern
period and how extensively it was being used in food.
This cookbook is about five hundred twenty pages long, and
(13:37):
it contained six hundred eight mentions of nutmeg and five
hundred sixty nine mentions of mace. And it's not just
in one kind of food. The recipes are arranged in
twenty four sections like boiled meats, roast meats, puddings, creams,
pies and tarts, fish and salads. That's salads just spelled differently.
(13:58):
The only sections that do don't seem to contain any nutmeg,
or the section on salads and the last section, which
is about what to feed poultry. It's possible that there's
a nutmeg mentioned in the salads that I missed that's
maybe spelled weirdly because there are a couple of spelling
variations in these in this book. But like basically every
kind of food had nutmeg in it. It's not entirely
(14:21):
clear when and how Europeans learned exactly where nutmeg came from.
A couple of the sources that were used in this
episode specifically mentioned geographer Zakaria al Kaswini, who was born
in what's now Iran, and they claim that he disclosed
what had been a secret. I'm honestly not sure what
(14:43):
he might have said about nutmeg and his writing because
I did not have access to those texts, but he
did describe cinnamon as coming from a place called serendib
which was Sri Lanka. He did that about twelve seventy five.
Ibn Batuta, who we've covered on the show before, all
also described Sri Lanka as the home to cinnamon in
thirteen forty. So cinnamon is not nutmeg. Sri Lanka is
(15:06):
off the eastern coast of India. It is far to
the west of the Banda Islands. But it's very clear
that sources like these translated into Latin, were one of
the ways Europeans learned about where various spices came from.
It's really likely that sources like these and other translations
of Arabic works, with ongoing patterns of trade, and the
(15:29):
accounts of European explorers and cartographers and other travelers, that
all this combined to give Europeans a general idea of
where the spice islands were by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
With that knowledge, various European powers started trying to capture
parts of South and Southeast Asia, not just for nutmeg,
(15:51):
but for the other spices and trade goods that were
coming out of the region as well. In fifteen eleven,
a force led by Alfonso de Albuquerque of Portugal captured
Malacca in what's now Malaysia, which was a key trading
hub for the Indonesian archipelago. This made it possible for
the Portuguese to start buying nutmeg directly from the Banda
(16:12):
Islands rather than going through Arab traders. At that point,
the Portuguese didn't really have the military or naval strength
to start trying to conquer the islands themselves, but the
Dutch and the English did. The Dutch invaded the Banda
Islands in fifteen ninety nine and established the Dutch East
(16:33):
India Company or VOC. Two years later, in sixteen sixteen,
the English took control of the island of Run, which
is part of this archipelago. They were basically just trying
to keep it out of the hands of the Dutch,
and then the English established the English East India Company.
The English and the Dutch fought over territory in these islands,
(16:56):
including the Dutch laying siege to Run and ultimately occupying
it in sixteen twenty one. The VOC aggressively worked to
limit nutmeg production only to the islands that it controlled,
and to establish a monopoly on the nutmeg trade. This
meant destroying nutmeg trees on islands it did not control
(17:17):
and trying to force the Bandonese to stop trading their
own nutmeg with any of their existing trading partners. There
was no central Bandonese authority for the Dutch or any
other European power to try to treat with. There were
various elders and families that had become wealthy as traders
on each of these islands, but even from one island
(17:40):
to another, there was no one primary authority figure. Broadly speaking, though,
the Bandonese refused to accept Dutch claims over the islands,
and the idea of a trading monopoly was just completely
foreign to them. They aggressively fought back, and the Dutch
decided the best course of action would be to clear
(18:01):
the islands of as many of them as possible. At first,
the Dutch tried to get the Bandonese to leave, including
trying to convince them to surrender their weapons, destroy their
own villages, and allow the Dutch to deport them to
somewhere else. When that didn't work, Governor General Jan Peterson
Kuhn met with his council to formulate a new plan,
(18:24):
and they unanimously agreed to burn down the Bandonese villages
and destroy all of their boats themselves, so that the
Bandonese would have no choice but to go where the
Dutch took them. During this sweep of destruction, the Dutch
captured and enslaved some of the Bandonese, but they massacred
many more. It's estimated that there were thirteen thousand to
(18:46):
fifteen thousand people living in the Banda Islands before the
Dutch conquest and genocide, and then only about one thousand afterward.
This took place over just a couple of months in
sixteen twenty one, but surviving Bandonese who had fled to
the mountains or to other nearby archipelagos continued to fight
(19:07):
against the Dutch for years. The people of the Banda
Islands had been nurturing and harvesting from nutmeg trees for
thousands of years. The trees were one part of the
land that they lived with, interconnected with everything else on
the islands that they shared. But the Dutch East India
Company moved to a system of large cultivated nutmeg estates,
(19:31):
including attempting to uproot young nutmeg trees out of their
forests to transplant them to these plantations. But the Bandonese
were the only people who actually knew how to grow
and process nutmeg, so the Dutch intentionally divided up the
remaining Bandonese population, including separating families, to make sure there
(19:52):
was at least one person with the necessary knowledge at
each of the plantations. The resulting practices for cultivating these
trees became a hybrid of indigenous knowledge and imported European methods.
The Dutch also enslaved people from other islands to work
on the plantations. About thirteen percent of the enslaved population
(20:14):
in the Banda Islands was Bandanese, and then the rest
were from somewhere else, usually in Southeast Asia, places that
the voc had claimed other territory. This had a similar
impact to the Transatlantic slave trade in Africa, including influencing
the escalation of warfare among different peoples, as the Dutch
(20:35):
then enslaved their prisoners of war. In addition to the
enslaved people who were working on nutmeg plantations, Dutch officials
also enslaved people in their households. They were also known
for forcing the people who they saw as the best
workers to serve on their trading ships. The Dutch East
India Company's efforts to keep the Banda Islands and its
(20:58):
nutmeg monopoly wasn't just a military effort. They also distributed
inaccurate maps to try to keep other European powers from
knowing exactly where the islands were, and once they had
a monopoly, they artificially controlled the price of nutmeg, including
by burning down warehouses full of it when there was
(21:20):
an oversupply. The Dutch monopoly on nutmeg lasted for more
than a century. In sixteen sixty seven, the Dutch Republic
solidified its hold on these islands through the Treaty of Bretta,
which ended the Second Anglo Dutch War. This treaty formalized
Dutch control of the island of Run in exchange for
(21:42):
English control of the island of Manhattan, which is why
sometimes people say the Dutch traded Manhattan for nutmeg. But
in seventeen sixty nine, French horticulturalist Pierre Poivre, who is
possibly the namesake of the nursery rhyme character Peter Piper,
smuggled thirty two nutmeg seed links from the Banda Islands
(22:02):
to the French colony of Mauritius. This was actually his
second attempt. On his first try, only two of the
seedlings survived. By seventeen seventy three, nutmeg trees were also
being introduced to other French colonies that seemed like they
might have the right climate for them. Later, during the
(22:22):
French Revolutionary Wars, the Dutch Republic became the Batavian Republic,
and then that came under control of the French Empire.
So during the Napoleonic Wars, the British invaded the Banda Islands,
now considered part of the general French territory. That was
a campaign that took about seven months, and then after
(22:43):
taking control of the islands, the British started introducing nutmeg
trees to their colonies in the Caribbean as well. English
planter Frank Gurney introduced nutmeg trees to Grenada in eighteen
forty three, with the first commercial non utmeg plantation established
there in eighteen fifty. These new sources of nutmeg meant
(23:05):
that the price of nutmeg plummeted in North America in
the mid to late nineteenth century, Eventually, control of the
Banda Islands did return to the Dutch, but by that
point nutmeg trees had been transplanted to so many other
places controlled by other countries that there was no way
for the Dutch to re establish a monopoly. Slavery was
(23:29):
abolished in the Netherlands Indies in eighteen sixty three. Japan
invaded Indonesia during World War II, and Indonesia proclaimed its
independence shortly after the Japanese surrender. Today, Indonesia is the
source of about seventy five percent of global nutmeg production.
Grenada was producing about twenty percent of the world's nutmeg
(23:50):
until Hurricane Ivan devastated the islands nutmeg trees in two
thousand and four. Since it takes roughly seven years for
nutmeg trees to produce their first fruit after being planted,
and it takes about twenty years for them to reach
full productivity, the nutmeg industry on Grenada took a very
long time to recover. Other sources of nutmeg include Sri Lanka, India, China,
(24:14):
and a number of islands off the coast of Africa
and in the Caribbean. After another sponsor break, we will
take a look at one of the weirder parts of
nutmeg's history. As Europeans started colonizing the Americas, as we
(24:38):
said earlier, they brought nutmeg with them. Nutmeg became less
expensive and more widely available in the United States after
the Dutch started to lose their monopoly. Between eighteen fifty
four and eighteen sixty eight, seventeen different mechanical nutmeg graters
were patented in the United States, so that's an indication
(24:58):
of how popular and available nutmeg was by then. Prior
to that, though, nutmeg could be really expensive, so sometimes
people made fake nutmegs out of wood to sell them
to unsuspecting people in place of the real thing. Maybe
there's some debate about this. A dried whole nutmeg does
(25:22):
look sort of like it's made of wood. It's feasible
that someone could carve one and try to pass it
off as the real thing. But nutmeg has a very
distinct fragrance. It might not be as perceptible as a
whole dried seed, especially somewhere like a store where it
might be surrounded by other fragrance spices, but as soon
(25:43):
as someone tried to grade it onto their food, it
would be completely obvious that they were getting sawdust and
not nutmeg. It would not take long for word to
spread that so and so down at the mercantile was
selling wooden fake nutmegs. It might be more feasible for
a traveling peddler who could leave town before people realized
(26:04):
their nutmegs were fake. But if people knew there was
a risk of buying wooden nutmegs, they could just take
a great big sniff before buying, and if it didn't
seem obvious at that point, insist on grading a tiny
bit off to smell it before making a purchase. Another
possibility is that importers and wholesalers were using wooden nutmegs
(26:26):
to stretch out their stock, so mixing some wooden nutmegs
into a barrel of real ones before shipping it out again.
This is possibly a little bit more believable, although there
are questions of how much it would have cost to
pay someone to hand carved wooden nutmegs with a nineteenth
century tool, and how that would compare to the cost
(26:47):
of actually having real nutmegs. I've read a whole paper
on this trying to work out whether it was economically
feasible to con people in this way. Regard wordless of
whether people really were passing off wooden nutmegs as the
real thing, there was definitely a perception that this was happening.
(27:09):
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wooden nutmeg as quote a
false or fraudulent thing, a fraud, cheat, or deception, also
in more direct illusions, as representing the type of something
useless or worthless. A lot of the uses of the
term wooden nutmeg that the OED sites are about merchants
(27:32):
and pedlars, specifically Northern merchants and pedlars in the United States.
In addition to the anti Northern bias shown there, some
of these entries are also anti Semitic. They compare these
Northern pedlars to Jewish pedlars and then either imply or
just flat out state that Jewish people are also dishonest.
(27:57):
A number of these uses of the term woulden nutmeg
also particularly focused on peddlers from Connecticut. A lot of
the nutmeg supply in North America came through Connecticut Port,
which is connected to why one of the unofficial mottos
for Connecticut is the Nutmeg State, and Connecticut residents are
(28:17):
sometimes called nutmegers. I was in Connecticut this weekend, and
I mentioned that this was the topic of the episode
that I was working on, and the Connecticut residence there
immediately said, are you going to talk about Connecticut being
the nutmeg State? The oeds first use reported for wooden
(28:38):
nutmegs is cited as being published in eighteen twenty two.
This was in a pedestrian tour of two thousand, three
hundred miles in North America to the Lakes, the Canadas,
and the New England States, performed in the autumn of
eighteen twenty one, embellished with views by P. Stansbury, New
(28:58):
York eighteen twenty that was published in North American Review.
One section described a group of people encountered by this
mister Stansbury quote. Among them were two persons whom he
pronounces to have been in the mild signification of the
term Boston sharpers, and who commenced business by a boisterous
(29:21):
colloquy about such smart men of their town, such and
such sharp fellows in their neighborhood, and made many shrewd
remarks concerning horse dealing, swapping, purchasing molasses, and vending clocks,
wooden bowls, and pumpkin pie dishes to the south ward.
We think we see the wicked smile of these rogues,
(29:43):
and making our poor pedestrian swallow all they chose to
put themselves off for, and a high treat they must
have had to see worthy mister Stansbury entering them in
his notebook, first as horse jockeys, then West India super cargoes,
then traveling peddlers, or rather all at once without the
(30:05):
good man's dreaming of the hoax. The Boston folks are sharp,
indeed rather too much so to blow themselves. Thus to
mister Stansbury, we have no doubt he expected every moment
to see the dogs pull out a bag of wooden nutmegs.
Another early example is from eighteen thirty six in the
(30:27):
Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville by Thomas
Halliburton that was published in the Nova Scotian. This passage
describes a captain Allspice of Nahaunt, which is a town
on a little peninsula in Massachusetts, roughly between Boston and Salem.
Quote he used to trade to Charleston, and he carried
(30:47):
a cargo once there of barrels of nutmegs. Well, he
put half a bushel of good ones into each end
of the barrel, and the rest he filled up with
wooden ones, so like the real thing. No soul could
tell the difference until he bit one with his teeth,
and that he never thought of doing until he was
first bit himself. Well, it's been a standing joke with
(31:09):
them Southerners again us ever since. This work uses the
term wooden nutmeg at two other points to describe someone
as a cheat. The idea that Northerners, especially northern merchants
and peddlers, were con artists, even made its way into
things like math problems. Elements of Algebra by Daniel Harvey Hill,
(31:32):
published in eighteen fifty seven, included this word problem quote.
A Yankee mixes a certain number of wooden nutmegs, which
cost him one quarter cent apiece, with a quality of
real nutmegs worth four cents apiece, and sells the whole
assortment for forty four dollars and gains three dollars seventy
(31:52):
five cents by the fraud. How many wooden nutmegs were there?
The answer, according to the text book, is one hundred.
I did some maths that came up with the answer
one hundred, but I don't know if that's the way
it was meant to be solved. Hill was a professor
of mathematics and civil engineering at Davidson College in North
(32:15):
Carolina and would go on to be a Confederate general.
One of the sources used in this episode framed all
of this as an example of Southern attitudes toward the
North in the years just before the US Civil War.
But this book was also published in Philadelphia, so if
that's the case, his northern publisher left it in there.
(32:38):
The use of the term wooden nutmegs went on long
past the end of the Dutch monopoly on the space.
A nineteen eighteen article by Logan Israe was published in
the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, and it was titled the
Literary Spirit among the Early Ohio Valley Settlers. This essay
is about the availability of books and literature in the
(32:59):
East Ohio Valley and the state of the publishing and
literary industries there. It reads, in part quote, how far
the commercial desire inspired the Western writers, One cannot tell,
but it had some influence. Nor was there an entire
lack of a book market in the valley. One writer
states that all the tin wagon, pitt coal, indigo, wooden nutmeg,
(33:22):
and wooden clock peddlers of Connecticut, then operating in the west,
had suddenly turned into book agents. Their books were said
to be out of date editions and unsalable books of
New England refurnished with new dates and gaudy illustrations. We
only need refer to tradition to prove how successful were
these locusts in gulling the people. It may easily be
(33:45):
surmised that many a Westerner imagined he could equal the
literary work in these books. The use of the word
wooden nutmegs to mean a dishonest cheat seems to have
been most prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nowadays,
most of the uses of it that you'll see in
newly published things like news articles, magazine articles, things like
(34:07):
that they are in discussions of wooden nutmegs and where
that saying came from, not in most cases somebody actually
using it to describe someone else as untrustworthy. Uh, if
you are about to go enjoy some eggnog or sugar
cookies or pumpkin pie or mold cider or speculas or
(34:28):
sausage or jerk chicken, or any of the many other
dishes in the world that often include nutmeg. Please enjoy,
but not a whole giant spoonful. We beg, please do not.
Uh yeah, so that's nutmeg. I have a little listener
man also to take us out, bring us on a
(34:48):
delicious episode. This is from Ali, and Ali wrote to
us and said, Hi, I love you guys. I've been
listening to the podcast since I learned what podcasts were
Hahi at least a decade or so. My favorite show
by far. I heard you all mentioned open access journals
in an April episode, and I thought i'd give you
an insider look at this change in publication type. In
(35:09):
the past, the payment for publishing journals came from the
organizations that had a subscription and anyone who chose to
pay individually to read them. The authors, researchers and scientists,
generally at universities, did not pay to publish them and
also receive no payment. Open access allows readers to view
them for free. Amazing and how all of scientific information
(35:31):
should work. But to the researchers and professors now have
to be the ones who pay to publish the article.
About three thousand dollars US per article. Huge universities such
as Duke might have a fund for this, but most
universities and their professors have no money to do so.
Therefore this work now goes unpublished in those journals. More
(35:52):
and more publishing companies are going open access because the
payment they receive with certainty about three thousand dollars from
the professors might be more than they would get from subscriptions.
Scientists and researchers with smaller budgets, such as history professors,
are finding it more and more difficult to publish their
studies and work. The big budget are when organizations are
(36:14):
the ones who can afford it. Now, so we both
love and hate access. Scientific information should be open to all,
inaccessible for researchers to publish. Heart emoji, love you all, Ali,
Thank you Ali for this. It's not really new information
to me, but I thought it might be to our listeners.
My opinion is that the entire ecosystem of academic journal
(36:39):
publishing is very broken in a variety of ways because
there's this whole issue. There are some resources available in
some cases for people to get funding to pay that
open access fee. I have somewhere on my computer or
(37:00):
a bookmarked list of like one particular organization that has
provided a lot of grant funding to researchers, and one
of the conditions is open access publishing that is then funded,
so like there are some options for that, but of
course those are in a limited supply and might not
exist in all the different fields and specializations. There's just
(37:25):
I feel like every time I turn around a new
headline about some kind of crisis in academic publishing, including
widespread stuff making it through peer review that should not
have and things being retracted that have gone on to
just be the basis of multiple other papers later on.
And for me as a person who is working on
(37:48):
a generalist podcast that does not have a budget to
pay individually for articles, sometimes when I'm working on something
like Unearthed, there might be hundreds of articles that I
am looking at and there's no way to pay the
somewhere between thirty and like seventy five dollars a piece
(38:11):
to read every one of them. I do have multiple
library cards to multiple library systems, including some academic libraries,
but even with that, sometimes, like if there's a paper
behind a seventy five dollars paywall or whatever that I
just don't have access to through any of those other
(38:34):
resources that's probably not getting used on the show. Occasionally
it's the seventy five dollars paywall for an article that
was published a century ago, and that gets very wild
to me because that eventually we get to the point
where you would think that would be in the public domain,
but it's still behind a paywall. So a lot of
(38:56):
different ways to criticize and find frustrating with this entire industry,
and yet it's one that we rely on for our work,
and that you know, people I know who are in
academia also rely on for their work in a completely
different way. So thank you again, Ali for that email,
(39:17):
and to everyone for listening to my rant about academic publishing.
If you'd like to send us a note about this
or any other podcast story, history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
(39:40):
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